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Overview
With lively intelligence and keen psychological insight, Janet Byrne tells the story of Frieda Lawrence's rich and tumultuous life, from her aristocratic Prussian childhood in one of the most divided regions of Europe, through her first marriage to a staid English professor in Nottingham; her wild affair with the cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst and free-love advocate Otto Gross; the scandalous abandonment of her husband and three children for the love of a coal miner's son who would become one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists; and her later years in and near Taos, New Mexico, first with Lawrence and then with her third husband, the handsome and massively unfaithful Angelino Ravagli, a former sharpshooter in the Italian army. Frieda is "in" every major novel D.H. Lawrence wrote during their eighteen years together, from The Rainbow and Women in Love to Lady Chatterley's Lover. She was his most trusted reader; his dependence on her was absolute. Hardly the untutored earth mother or sexual libertine frequently portrayed in books about Lawrence, Frieda had an uncanny and complex vision of relations between the sexes and a blithe, aggressively anti-intellectual surefootedness that helped shape one of the most famously embattled unions of the century as well as its literary progeny. Drawing on scores of unpublished archival sources, memoirs, and interviews with friends and relatives, Janet Byrne has brilliantly captured Frieda's peculiar genius in this compelling biography, a dramatic saga of individualism, humor, will, and creative energy.Editorials
Donna Seaman
If you know anything about D. H. Lawrence, you know something about Frieda--his muse, wife, and nurse--but not much. Frieda has always been embedded in her husband's literary life. Now, thanks to Byrne, a remarkably skilled first-time biographer, we can finally know Frieda for herself, and she was a character. The daughter of a Prussian baron, young Frieda was "athletic, headstrong, and undisciplinable." She became a carelessly beautiful, passionate, and unconventional woman frank about her appetites and possessed of a keen and unpretentious intellect. She was also a woman without a country. Born in Lorraine during the German occupation, Frieda was stigmatized for her nationality throughout her youth and during the frenetic world-war era when she lived in England, Italy, and the U.S. Byrne chronicles Frieda's pre-Lawrence life with flair, emphasizing her free spiritedness and the conflicts inherent in her first marriage to a staid Englishman. Her ardor for Lawrence, a student of her husband's and not the first or the last of her lovers, drove Frieda to abandon her family and undertake what became her lifework, assisting Lawrence in the creation of his revolutionary writings. Byrne's insights into their volatile relationship are fresh and illuminating, while her coverage of Freida's life after Lawrence's early death adds the finishing touches to this rich and memorable portrait.Book Details
Published
June 7, 1995
Publisher
New York : HarperCollinsPublishers, c1995.
Pages
504
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780060190019